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Dive Brief:

• Gap Inc. announced plans to use artificial intelligence to modernize its shared marketing organization, per a press release. The company’s portfolio includes its namesake brand alongside the Old Navy, Banana Republic and Athleta labels.
• The company will leverage a pre-existing partnership with Google Cloud to build a unified data foundation, as well as enlist Zeta Global to engineer an AI-powered marketing stack. Gap will also work with Publicis Sapient to better connect marketing and consumer behavior.
• The plan begins with a focus on Gap Inc.’s owned marketing channels, using AI to personalize experiences at scale, improve customer interactions and speed up campaign delivery across key channels.

Dive Insight:

The announcement of Gap’s latest AI-powered efforts comes amid a flood of news around AI partnerships that has dominated the marketing world in recent months and in the first days of Cannes Lions. What differentiates the retailer’s plans is the detail on how such partnerships could help it transform its marketing organization into a scalable, real-time growth engine.

“This transformation is about bringing together the creativity of our teams with the power of AI — removing silos, unlocking better data, and building a marketing model that learns, adapts and improves with every customer interaction,” Damon Berger, senior vice president for marketing shared services at Gap Inc., said in the press release. “We are using AI to give our teams more time for strategy, storytelling and the work that creates lasting brand love.” 

The idea that AI will help marketers focus on core functions like strategy and creative work is in line with how AI providers have positioned the technology to an industry that is wary of further encroachment on its responsibilities and jobs. Gap has long been lauded for the creativity of its marketing efforts, particularly for its namesake brand, which have led to increased relevancy and sales gains.

Central to the transformation is Gap Inc.’s partnership with Google Cloud that kicked off in 2025. The retailer will rely on the tech giant to unite customer and product intelligence to enable personalization, decision-making and continuous learning across content, activations and e-commerce. Gap will also use tools including Agent Studio, Agent Engine and Gemini models for AI workflows and models Nano Banana and Veo to create image and video content, respectively, at scale.

Gap has tapped Zeta Global to help transform its owned marketing channels with the company’s Athena by Zeta intelligence layer. Athena connects data, decisions and execution, and has agentic capabilities that bring together functions including strategy, creative development, campaign activation and optimization.

In addition, Gap will work with Publicis Sapient to make its marketing more connected, measurable and responsive to customer behavior, supporting transformation across talent, process, technology, data and partner ecosystems to improve effectiveness and support growth. 

Gap Inc. in Q1 2026 saw its ninth consecutive quarter of positive comparable sales, with comparable sales at its namesake brand buoying smaller gains at Old Navy and Banana Republic and an 11% decline at Athleta. President and CEO Richard Dickson named technology as one of the company’s investment priorities.

“We are a fashion company that is brand-led and intelligence powered. The brands create the demand by executing on the reinvigoration playbook, intelligence enabled by data and AI empowers our teams to make decisions that drive greater consistency and efficiency,” the executive said on an earnings call.